JEFF PRESTRIDGE: Chief executive David Cutter lives up to his name at Skipton Building Society

Sometimes I wonder who it is Skipton Building Society serves - customers or the pockets of its directors.

I say this because of the eyecatching pay awards its executives routinely receive, come recession or recovery.

Last year, for example, David Cutter (chief executive), Richard Twigg (group finance director) and Mark Fleet (distribution director) received remuneration increases of 22, 19 and 27 per cent respectively. Cutter saw his package bloat to £751,000. Nice work, if you can get it.

Savings: Skipton Building Society has announced it is cutting its mortgage variable rate from next month

Yet it is time to hand out a little (not a lot of) praise to the country’s fourth-largest building society.

Last week, it announced it was cutting its mortgage variable rate from next month – 5.49 per cent down to 4.99 per cent on home loans and from 5.69 per cent to 5.19 per cent on buy-to-let.

It means that those 1,300 borrowers who are currently sitting on a two-year discounted loan will see their mortgage payments drop while 35,000 (on fixed-rates) will know that once their deal comes to an end they will revert to a lower mortgage rate than they expected, assuming they don’t go elsewhere in search of something better.

Some borrowers will do extra-ordinarily well out of this re-pricing – especially those fortunate enough to have been eligible for a 3.71 percentage point discount for two years. Their rate will now drop from 1.78 per cent to a rock-bottom 1.28 per cent. Lucky for some.

David Hollingworth, mortgage expert at London & Country, says those fortunate 1,300 should squirrel away their monthly savings and then use them to pay off a chunk of their mortgage. Sound advice.

It would be good now if Skipton’s lead was followed by other building societies. The variable mortgage rates currently applied by the likes of Chelsea (5.65 per cent), Leeds (5.69 per cent) and Newcastle (5.99 per cent) are all far too expensive – especially in light of Thursday’s decision by the great and good who sit on the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England to keep the base rate at 0.5 per cent. To the bosses of these lenders, I say: follow Mr Cutter’s lead and get cutting.

I have lost count of the number of emails I receive urging me to click on a link and confirm my bank details.

I ignore them because invariably I don’t have an account with the said bank – and I know them straightaway to be phishing emails sent out by cyber criminals in the hope of stealing my identity and plundering my bank account (criminals, please note: there is nothing in my account to plunder). Some of the emails are so poorly written they make me cry rather than get my goat.

Yet I must admit that last week I was nearly caught out by an email, purportedly from Apple, telling me my ID had been locked – and would remain so until I reconfirmed all my login details.

Given my undying love for my iPad Air, iTunes and being able to listen to BBC Radio 4’s The Archers on iPlayer – and fearing I would be denied these treats – I was tempted to click on the link and reveal all.

This was even though closer inspection of the email did reveal some glaring grammatical errors – ‘we regret to announce you’, ‘within a 24 hours’ and ‘login in using’.

Thankfully, taking advice from my colleague Laura Shannon, I didn’t fall for the scam – known in the trade as ‘smishing’ (the first letters standing for ‘short message’). And late last week website actionfraud.police.uk was warning people not to have anything to do with the emails.

Anyone in receipt of such a dastardly email (mine was headed ‘Apple/iCloud account restricted’) should report it to Action Fraud, either using its online fraud reporting tool or calling it on 0300 123 2040.

Finally, hats off to Neil Woodford for going public on his decision to ditch his investment fund’s holding in HSBC because the bank is suffering from ‘fine inflation’.

Woodford, who over 26 years built an outstanding reputation at investment house Invesco Perpetual for making investors serious amounts of money, now runs the eponymous Woodford Equity Income fund. He has sold out of HSBC after only two months (the fund was only launched in June) because he believes it is going to be hit by a series of big fines, compromising its ability to sustain dividends. He describes the bank as a ‘challenged business in a troubled sector’.

If other fund managers followed Woodford’s lead, it would surely send a clear signal to this country’s big banks that behaviour that leads to massive fines can no longer be tolerated. Maybe a consumer friendly banking sector would be the end result. Maybe pigs would fly after all.